Friday, April 15, 2016

As
homicides in New York have fallen sharply over the last two decades, the
tit-for-tat violence between crews like 3 Staccs has persisted…[T]estimony has
given jurors a look at the warrior subculture of some young men in and around
Harlem projects. The gang members described how they would venture into another
gang’s territory to commit assaults, and then trumpet their exploits on
Facebook, daring their rivals to respond. They would pool money to buy communal
guns that they would keep close at hand for fights that escalated…Though some
gang members sold marijuana and cocaine, the disputes were mainly about respect
and revenge.[1]

It is tempting to characterize the 3 Staccs
as ‘barbarians’. In fact they were behaving exactly like Greeks of the Heroic
Age. Revenge and the quest for ‘respect’ drove them; they raided enemy
territory and fought to win honor for themselves their mates. Stripped of its
literary packaging, the Iliad is an
account of the gang warfare in the warrior subculture in the Eastern
Mediterranean, doing violence for the sake of honor and for the possession of a
woman.

Nowadays population is denser and gang
warfare is largely restricted to city neighborhoods; then it occupied the
Mediterranean, from Ithaca to Troy. But the story is the same: violent young
men, under the direction of a few warlords, fighting for the chance to rape and
pillage, and to capture slaves, women and loot. This is the way the world was
when muscle and guts were what mattered.

These days heroism has receded like the ebbing
tide, leaving only isolated pools of violence and machismo in the Global South
and elsewhere in urban slums, where young warriors replay the Iliad.

The Odyssey
is another matter. According to psychologist Julien Jaynes, it was the
transition from the world depicted in the Iliad
to the world of the Odyssey that
marks the dawn of human consciousness as we understand it. ‘Iliadic man’ he writes,
‘did not possess subjectivity as we do…he had no awareness of his awareness of
the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon’.[2] In
the Odyssey, ‘wiley’ Odysseus comes
into his own: the Greeks have gotten the idea that there is such a thing as
intelligence, and that it is advantageous. Women figure, not merely as spoils
of war, but as powerful agents.

The 3 Staccs are not barbarians. They are Iliadic heroes—anachronisms from an age when
the whole world was a slum, and all but a few warlords lived in poverty because
resources were burnt off in endless warfare. In a warrior culture players are
locked into a sub-optimal equilibrium. Each imagines that he can, and will, win
consistently and, eventually, get all the loot. But in fact, the game goes back
and forth, and the rapers and pillagers are themselves raped and pillaged. In
the process, lives are lost, resources are wasted, and everyone is worse off
than they would be if they just minded their own business.

The West only escaped that trap when people
realized that military adventurism was wasteful: better to invest in
plowshares, in manufacture and trade, than in swords. It happened once: we
became civilized. Civilization spread and in the end only a minority was left
out—in urban slums and in the Global South.

The mystery is: how do we get here from
there—from gang warfare to rational self-interested business, from a world where
muscle and guts are all that matter to one where intelligence (Odysseus’ wiliness
and Penelope’s prudence) is decisive? That is the problem of violence at home
and international terrorism. What will it take to get latter day Achaeans to
abandon the ethos of romantic heroism, the quest for honor and revenge, in
favor of the rational self-interest?